The Greek isle of Symi is where Tiresias sets up his launderette. Take just a few short

steps up one of the steep paths that lead away from the seafront, pass beneath the cypresses

pricking the azure sky, the pink blossoms, still as stone in the breathless air. Duck beneath an

archway, expecting cool shade to greet you. Instead, stacked machines jump on terracotta

tiles spinning heavy loads of laundry.  

Washers and driers rumble. Clouds of steam get sucked over and under rows of ironing

boards to the walled courtyard out back. Tiresias himself presses the clothes, when he isn’t

reading futures in mounds of bubbles. The fortune teller, seer, he prefers, wears his blessing

(curse) from the gods as lightly as the linen shirt on his back. He favours a mint green. The

birds that line the tiny courtyard walls trill the future to him, as do the dead, who arrive in

dribs and drabs and usually at night. Tiresias learns he can read the scum floating on the

sudsy water, catch the what will be before it vanishes forever down a plughole. A launderette

suits him. Long years spent in the female form give him an appreciation of delicate silks, of

beaded gowns, as well as a blood-stained gusset or tear from someone else’s rough hand that

tells him more than the foam ever will. He takes note of who wears long sleeves, even as the

thermostat rises and the air shimmers with heat and he does not charge them.  

Not everyone wants to know the future. That, Tiresias understands well enough. The

impulse to open the door and briskly sweep the knowledge away, watch it billow dustily out

into clouds where the sea meets the sky. He has no choice. Whether it is the sing-song of the

birds, imparting their foresight, or the dead with their scoldings, who often arrive late or

exactly on time (which is just as bad), he has to listen. 

The dark-haired women who help when the piles of laundry become mountainous

shake their heads. Shiny-faced from the heat, they do not want to know about tomorrow. It

could be worse than today. And if the day after is worse yet? Like standing between mirrors,

knowledge of an unpleasant but inescapable future could stretch out forever on every side. At

least in ignorance, there is hope. 

The dead were being irritatingly unforthcoming, so Tiresias has only his gut to trust

when the woman comes knocking. A stirring of unease like the indigestion that plagues him

from the Grecian appetite for filo pastry flutters in his belly. She brings with her a cerise

gown, hardly worn, and lays it down like an offering.

I want to know, she says.

No, you don’t, Teriasias replies. He doesn’t need to look, has contemplated hanging a

sign with those very words printed large, so he doesn’t have to bother interrupting his

morning coffee in the courtyard, interrupted only by the murmuring bees and the sea salt

breeze.

I do.

She doesn’t give in on the first attempt. The next day, it’s a blouse. Slightly more

believably soiled, with faint dark patches beneath the arms and a T across the chiffon at the

back. She asks again. Her dark eyes are wide and almond-shaped, fringed by thick lashes.

Gold nuggets weigh her earlobes and jewels on her fingers tik tak on the counter as she

drapes the blouse.

Why do you want to know? He asks her, trying not to sigh but folding his arms.

She looks appealing, but he is impervious to that. Seven years spent fluttering his own

eyelashes has armoured him against any flirting.

Who wouldn’t want to know?

Lots of people, he tells her flatly. 

In the moments that pass, Tiersias feels how insubstantial they are. Their two tiny

hearts beating on the earth’s crust. Beyond the churning washer drums, the voices on the

sunlit cobbled streets. His awareness radiates outward, ripples from a droplet, across the flat

turquoise planes of ocean, spinning upward through the cloud, through the stratosphere to see

their tiny collections of atoms forming muscle and sinew, thoughts and desires. He comes

back, spiralling into himself once more and those eyes are still fixed on him, yearningly.

So he tells her. As if she is a piece on a chessboard, aware of only her own square, he

shows her the board. Looking down at the counter, with the dead whispering in his ear, he

traces the grain of the wood with a fingertip as he describes the moves that lie ahead, the

placement of the other pieces and how they will take their turns.

He stops before the end. Or rather, she stops him. She backs away, cheeks flushing, her

head shaking, before she leaves, out into the sunlight and hurrying away. The blouse is hangs

limp on its wire hanger. Tiresias is not unduly worried. She is not the first to look at him with

horror. We think we know what we want until we get it.

The legal action that follows is a surprise. Tiresias is stern with the dead, who have not

warned him and shake with barely suppressed chortles in their own good humour at his

astonishment. But he should have known. The jewellery spoke of connections, of sharply

defined suits and thick wads of typed eviction notices, so out of placed on this sleepy, pastel

island. There is no satisfaction in being right. Not like this. He leaves the machines, to rot and

rust or, more likely, be pilfered. As the final spin cycle comes to an end, Tiresias once more

makes his way into the world, the dead trailing after him, shouting their secrets that only he

can hear.